A document's lifecycle covers the period from the document's creation through to its destruction. During its lifecycle, a document is subject to changing requirements for capture, storage, index, access, and timely retrieval and deletion. Typically, organizations retain documents for a minimum period of time (i.e., retention period) prior to the destruction of the documents which may depend upon several factors. For example, documents related to litigation may be assigned a retention period that complies with various laws and regulations. Business records may have a retention period based on one or more business rules. A default category having a short retention period may be defined for non-essential business documents. When documents are no longer needed, an effective retention policy ensures timely and cost-effective removal from the repository. In practice, at the expiration of the retention period, an administrator of a document management system may create one or more programs to search the document repository databases for expired documents and delete them. These programs may then be scheduled to run using the native scheduler provided with the operating system. However, this approach may introduce operational challenges and inaccuracies, such as incorrectly removing or retaining documents, or monitoring and recovering a program that failed during an off-hours execution.